I had a design plan in mind before throwing the set and knew that I wanted to try an interesting trimming technique in order to get the chiseled, faceted aesthetic. To start, I threw each of the pieces a little thicker than necessary to account for the trimming I would do later. Once leather-hard, I took a looped ribbon tool and carved chunks out of the outside relatively deeply. I went in all different directions while carving, using the wide and narrow end of the tool to get different sized facets. I left a little bit of the top edge uncarved to leave a comfortable sipping rim and to enhance with a bit of Allspice glaze. After trimming the texture, I trimmed the feet very basically and simplistically. There are no handles on the cups to keep them simple and to save on the workload (as there are five separate cups), and the handle on the teapot is an unornamented slab cut-out, to keep with the simple aesthetic. Inside each piece is a slightly glossy, white, Vanilla Spice glaze. The outer rims (and handle/spout) are all wrapped in the tan Allspice glaze.

After creating this set, I’m satisfied with the result. The chiseled stone texturing came out exactly as I imagined, and the set includes a teapot and more than two similar cups which I am pretty happy about – I finally achieved my goal of making a functional (and fashionable) tea set and am proud of the accomplishment.

Personally, the most challenging part was picking out which color of glazes to use. The first thing I always notice on a piece of pottery is the way the colors flow together. I simply love colors, which makes it difficult for me to choose. Eventually, I decided on the fade from a light blue to a dark purple. Some of the glazes moved while others weren’t supposed to, so it took layering both the moving and non-moving glazes together, two runs through the glaze kiln to accomplish the idea I hoped to achieve.